Never Forget

by Michel Bussi

  I’m having dinner with her.

  At her place.

  The glow of the fire in the hearth caresses her pale skin. We’re drinking champagne: Piper-Heidsieck 2005. We will make love in a few hours, or perhaps even before the end of the meal.

  We will be lovers for at least one night.

  Perhaps several.

  Perhaps every night for the rest of my life, like a dream that doesn’t evaporate in the morning but accompanies me into the shower, then in the lift in the last block in the Cité des 4000 that hasn’t been blown up, then all the way to Courneuve-Aubervilliers station where I’ll board the RER B line.

  She smiles at me. She lifts the champagne glass to her lips, I imagine the bubbles going down into her body, sparkling inside her. I rest my lips on hers. Moist with Piper-Heidsieck like a fizzy sweet.

  She chose the intimacy of her home over the elegance of a restaurant by the sea. Perhaps in the end she was a bit ashamed to be seen out with me, wary of the people at the next table seeing a disabled Arab out with the most beautiful girl in the whole region. I understand, even if I don’t give a damn about their petty jealousy. I deserve this moment more than anyone. I’ve staked everything on it. All those times luck didn’t go my way, I kept playing the game. And I never stopped believing.

  I’ve won.

  I first met this girl six days ago, in the most unlikely place to meet a fairy: Yport.

  During those six days, I almost died several times.

  I’m alive.

  During those six days, I was accused of murder. Of several murders. The most sordid crimes you can imagine. I almost believed it myself.

  I’m innocent.

  I’ve been hunted down. Judged. Sentenced.

  I’m free.

  You will see, you too will find it hard to believe the ramblings of a poor disabled Arab. The miracle will seem too unlikely. The cops’ version will seem much more plausible. You’ll see, you too will doubt me. Right to the end.

  You’ll come back to the start of this story, you’ll reread these lines and you’ll think I’m mad, that I’m setting a trap for you, or that I’ve made it all up.

  But I haven’t made anything up. I’m not mad. No trap. I’m just asking one thing of you: that you trust me. To the end.

  It’ll all turn out fine, you’ll see.

  It’s February 24th, 2014. It all started ten days ago, one Friday evening, February 14th, just as the kids from the Saint Antoine Therapeutic Institute were leaving for home.

  2

  TRUST ME TO THE END?

  Out of nowhere, rain began to fall on the three red-brick buildings of the Saint Antoine Therapeutic Institute of Bagnolet, on the three-hectare park and on the white statues of generous, illustrious, and forgotten donors of centuries gone by. A dozen silhouettes stirred abruptly, giving the illusion that the shower was bringing the sculptures to life. Doctors, nurses and stretcher-bearers in white coats ran for shelter like ghosts worried about getting their shrouds wet.

  Some took refuge under the porch, others in the twenty or so cars, minivans, and minibuses parked one behind the other on the gravel avenue, their doors still open, kids crammed inside.

  As always on a Friday evening, the less severely disabled teenagers were heading off to spend the weekend with their families. This particular Friday they could look forward to a weekend plus two weeks of holiday.

  As soon as I’d deposited Grégory in the back seat of the Scenic, I abandoned his empty wheelchair in the downpour and joined the others in running for shelter. Three cars away, its revolving lights sweeping the rain, was the ambulance; I peered through the rain, trying to see Ophélie, then headed back to the carers’ area.

  It was like entering one of those picnic rooms for skiers in the mountains. The predominantly female staff of the Saint Antoine Institute—nurses, teachers, and psychotherapists—were sitting with their frozen fingers wrapped around mugs of tea or coffee. Some flicked a glance in my direction, others ignored me; Sarah and Fanny, the youngest teachers, smiled at me; Nicole, the chief shrink, let her gaze linger on my artificial leg, as always. Most of the girls at the Institute liked me, to varying degrees depending on their age, whether they’re in a relationship, and their professional conscience. The Mother Teresas outnumbered the Marilyns.

  That asshole Jérôme Pinelli, the section head, came in after me. He scanned the room, and then looked me up and down like a cop.

  “They’re loading Ophélie into the ambulance. Are you proud of yourself?”

  Not really.

  I pictured the blue revolving light in the courtyard. Ophélie howling at them to leave her alone. I tried without success to come up with a few words of explanation, or at least of apology. Then I looked around the room for help, knowing I wouldn’t find any. My colleagues lowered their heads.

  “We’ll sort it out after the holidays,” Pinelli concluded.

  To the list of everyday torturers in search of a victim, to the vicious gods and sadistic teachers, we must add little fascist bosses like Jérôme Pinelli. Fifty-three. HR manager. Less than six months in the job and already he was responsible for one case of adultery, two depressions, and three dismissals.

  He went and stood in front of the big poster of Mont Blanc that I’d hung on the wall of the staff room. One metre by two. The entire massif: Mont Blanc, Mont Maudit, Aiguille du Midi, Dent du Géant, Aiguille Verte . . .

  “Damn,” Pinelli said, “it’s good to be rid of those stupid teenagers. Oh well, in less than ten hours I’ll be in Courchevel . . .”

  He turned slowly on his heel as if to let the ladies admire his profile, then came and stood in front of me and stared pointedly at my prosthesis.

  “What about you? Off to the snow, Salaoui? Cool. With your carbon foot you only need to hire one ski!”

  He burst out laughing, but he was on thin ice: his audience of female carers were hesitant about joining in. The Marilyns chuckled, the Mother Teresas were silently outraged.

  Before he could dig himself in any deeper, the opening bars of “I Gotta Feeling” rang out from his pocket. He took out his phone, grunted “Fuck!”, then sauntered out, addressing me over his shoulder:

  “When you get back we’ll have to sort this one out, Salaoui. She’s a minor, I can’t always cover for you.”

  Asshole!

  At that moment, Ibou came in and shut the door in his face.

  Ibou was my only real ally. A stretcher-bearer at the Institute, it was also his job to put the inmates in straitjackets or get between them when they lost control. Sometimes he helped me with chores like setting up scaffolding, moving furniture around, or changing the tire on a wheelchair. Ibou was built like a tank carved from a baobab tree. Think Omar Sy. Both the Marilyns and the Mother Teresas were in agreement: that bastard was handsome, cool, and funny. Athletic, too.

  They weren’t aware that when the two of us ran the fifteen kilometres from the Parc de la Courveuve to the Forêt de Montmorency every Thursday, I always finished half a lap ahead of him in the final sprint.

  He gave me a high five.

  “I heard that jerk and his dig about skiing. Joking aside, Jam, are you going on holiday?”

  He turned towards the Mont Blanc poster, looking at it with yearning.

  “I’m heading to Yport.”

  “Yport? Whoa! Are there any slopes?”

  “It’s a village in Normandy, big man. Near Étretat. A thousand-metre climb over ten kilometres. But no snow or ski-lifts . . .”

  Ibou whistled, then addressed the female carers:

  “Don’t be fooled by appearances, my man Jamal here is a top athlete! This mule of a guy could be a contender in the Paralympics, claiming glory and medals for the Saint Antoine Institute, but he’s got it into his head that he wants to be the first one-legged athlete to run the Mont Blanc Ultra-Trail . . .” />
  I immediately felt a shift in the way the women looked at me. Ibou went on:

  “The hardest race in the world. There’s no stopping this one, is there?”

  The women’s eyes darted between me and the poster. In my mind’s eye, I was riding the Aiguille du Midi cable car, three thousand metres above sea level, looking down on Mer de Glace . . . Vallorcine. The UTMB—the Ultra-Trail Mont Blanc—was a sixty-eight kilometre run, with an elevation gain of around 9,600 metres, taking around forty-six hours . . . On one leg. Was I capable of such a feat? Pushing myself to the limit, until I forgot my pain? Tears were glistening in the carers’ eyes; they were already feeling sorry for me. I felt myself blushing like a virgin. I turned my gaze to the wall, focusing intently on the dirty white plaster, the traces of mould and rust from the leaking ceiling.

  “And Jam’s a single guy,” Ibou went on. “Doesn’t one of you want to go with him? Forget that Yport crap!”

  He winked in my direction. I was standing by.

  “Come on, girls,” he urged. “One volunteer! A week of your dreams, keeping company with an Olympic champion, hitting those glorious heights with him.”

  Thanks to Ibou, I felt unstoppable. Then he added:

  “Only joking, ladies. You’ve got to hand it to me, I got you this time!”

  3

  UNTIL I FORGET MY PAIN?

  Lying at my feet, the corpse slept on a bed of pebbles.

  The blood flowed gently under her head, forming a red silk sheet pulled by an invisible hand, a scarlet wave that flowed softly towards the sea.

  Even in death, the stranger was incredibly beautiful. Her jet-black hair covered her cold, white face like seaweed clinging to a rock polished by successive tides. The girl’s body had become one more fallen piece of cliff that the sea would sculpt until it melted into the décor, for eternity.

  My gaze shifted from the body to the towering chalk cliff. In the three days I’d spent in Yport, those cliffs had never seemed so high. Streams of clay from the meadows above left trails on the rockface, like the stains left by rust, damp and dirt on a prison wall. This was a wall put there by the gods to keep mortals from escaping; to jump the wall would mean losing one’s life.

  I checked my watch: 8.28.

  Less than a quarter of an hour had passed since I had left the Sirène for my daily run. I thought again of the landlord’s advice:

  Watch out, Jamal, the grass will be slippery on the cliff.

  And then the red scarf caught on the fence, the sheep, the blockhouse . . . the pictures flowed together, one after another. I saw the girl on the edge of the precipice, her torn dress, her last words, “Don’t come any closer . . . You could never understand.” The unfathomable desolation on her face before she toppled into the void, the Burberry cashmere scarf that I had held out to her, clutched in her fist.

  My heart went on thumping in time with my frantic race, right after she jumped, all the way to the beach, as if I could have got there before her, caught her in my arms.

  Ridiculous.

  “I saw her fall,” murmured a sombre voice behind me.

  It was the man in the brown leather jacket. He approached the body with obvious reluctance.

  “I heard you yell,” he said in the same weary voice. “I turned around and then I saw the girl dropping like a stone.”

  A grimace of disgust contorted his face, perhaps recalling the moment of impact. He was right, when the girl toppled over the edge I had let out a yell so loud the whole of Yport must have heard.

  “She didn’t fall,” I told him. “She jumped.”

  The guy didn’t respond. Had he grasped the difference?

  “Poor girl!” the old woman on my right observed.

  She was the third witness to the tragedy. I later found out that her name was Denise. Denise Joubain. Like the man in the brown jacket, she had been on the beach before me, more than a hundred metres away from the place where the girl had landed. After my frantic sprint I arrived at the body a few seconds before they did. Denise was wearing yellow socks that extended above the tops of her wellies before disappearing beneath her canvas dress and a grey coat. She was clutching a dog, a Shih Tzu wearing a beige jumper with red stripes that made me think of Where’s Waldo?

  “Hush now, Arnold,” she murmured into the dog’s ear before continuing: “Such a beautiful girl . . . Are you certain she jumped?”

  Denise’s observation struck me as idiotic.

  Of course she jumped.

  Then I realised I was the only one who’d witnessed the actual suicide. The other two had been strolling on the beach, looking out to sea, and had only turned their heads when I shouted.

  What was she implying? That it was an accident?

  In my mind’s eye I saw again the terrible distress etched on that angelic face, the moment before her desperate leap.

  “Positive,” I replied. “I spoke to her up there, near the blockhouse. I tried to reason with her . . .”

  As I spoke, I was aware of Denise Joubain casting a critical eye over me, as if my skin, my accent and my artificial leg were indicators I was not to be trusted.

  What did she think? That it wasn’t an accident? That someone had pushed her?

  I craned my neck to look up the cliff, then added, as if to justify myself:

  “It all happened very quickly. I got as close as I could. I tried to reach out to her. To throw her a—”

  The words caught in my throat.

  For the first time I noticed a detail on the body lying a metre away from me. A surreal detail . . .

  Impossible!

  The tragedy was replaying frame-by-frame in my mind.

  That beautiful, despairing face.

  The Burberry scarf floating from her hand.

  The empty horizon.

  Damn! What was I missing?

  My gaze fixed on the red fabric at my feet.

  There had to be a rational explanation.

  There . . .

  “We must do something!”

  I turned. It was Denise who had spoken. For a moment I wondered whether she was addressing me or the dog clasped to her chest.

  “She’s right,” the man in the brown leather jacket insisted. “We need to call the police.”

  He had the voice of a heavy smoker. Above his worn leather jacket, his long straggly grey hair emerged from a bottle-green woollen cap resting on two ears that were red with cold. He struck me as someone who lived alone, divorced and unemployed. Why else would he be out here, taking stock of his life, at this time of day? He reminded me of Lanoël, the depressive maths teacher at Collège Jean-Vilar who the students had nicknamed Xanax. In my mind, I’d already dubbed this guy on the beach Xanax, though I later discovered his name was Christian Le Medef. I did not know then that I would see him again on this same beach, the next day, almost at the same time, looking even more depressed, and that he would tell me something that would turn the pair of us into accomplices bound by the same paranoia.

  Arnold, still clasped to the bosom of his mistress, carried on yapping.

  Call the cops?

  A tremor ran through the palm of my right hand, as if the cashmere scarf was slipping through my fingers again. My eyes no longer obeyed me, they returned to the scrap of red fabric. I must have looked ill at ease, because Denise and Xanax were eyeing me with suspicion.

  Or maybe they were just waiting for me to take the initiative.

  Call the cops?

  Then it dawned on me that neither of them had a mobile phone. I took out my iPhone and dialled the emergency number.

  “Fécamp police station,” a masculine voice replied after a few seconds.

  I explained the situation. The suicide. The location. Yes, the girl was dead, there was no doubt about it, a fall of 120 metres on to the pebble beach. One witness had seen her ju
mp, the other two had seen her hit the ground.

  At the other end of the line they noted everything down. They sounded agitated, asking me to repeat the exact location, then they hung up.

  “The police are on their way,” I told Denise and Xanax. “They’ll be here in ten minutes.”

  They just nodded. For a while the only sound was the waves rushing over the pebbles. Xanax glanced down at his watch with every incoming wave. He didn’t seem upset so much as annoyed, like when a pile-up results in a monster traffic jam and you find yourself obsessing about being late instead of thinking about the victims. I wondered why a man wandering the beach at eight in the morning would be fretting about the time.

  Suddenly Denise let Arnold drop to the ground. The Shih Tzu took refuge between his mistress’s boots as she grabbed my arm.

  “No sign of the cops! Come on, lad, give me your jacket.”

  At first I couldn’t work out why she was asking me to take it off, especially when it was barely five degrees out here.

  “Your tracksuit top!” she demanded. “Hand it over.”

  My tracksuit? She thought my North Face WindWall windbreaker was a “tracksuit top?”

  I did as she asked, and Denise used my purple windbreaker to cover the girl’s face and upper body.

  What prompted this? Religion? Superstition? The desire to protect poor Arnold from psychological trauma?

  Regardless, I was grateful to her.

  As Denise arranged the makeshift shroud I took one last look at the scarf. In my head, a crazy voice was yelling:

  How is this possible?

  It was all I could think about. No matter how many times I ran through the sequence of events, every second, every gesture, I could come up with no coherent explanation.

  The girl lying dead on the pebbles was wearing the red Burberry cashmere scarf wrapped around her neck.

  4